Road to Nowhere
by imogensrocket
Summary: Words, like feelings, were often misinterpreted and messy. No matter how short, or unsaid they may be.


**Disclaimer: I don't own Degrassi.**

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**Author's Note: **I always wanted to write Jatie, and I finally got inspired, so this is pre-Vegas Jatie. It's essentially drabble, but I hope everyone enjoys!

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"When do you feel most content?"

She's startled for a moment, because he's never asked her a question like that before. With Jake, everything was face value, and she liked him for that. He was simple, easy… accepting.

She puts down her textbook, biting her lip as she lets the question mull in her head.

He waits patiently, and her heart is beating as she thinks. Then she shrugs.

"I don't know," she says, and his smile flickers before she can continue, and she squares her shoulders. "I think I'm most content when I'm driving, and it's just me, and I have no set destination and I just drive. I even enjoy getting lost."

It startles him to hear that. Katie Matlin, a type-A girl who planned everything down to the last microsecond enjoyed getting lost.

"Why?" he asks her, leaning closer to her.

"I guess," she sighs, "because I want to know if I can do it alone."

At his questioning gaze, she continues.

"The problem," she elaborates. "When I'm lost, no matter where I am, I want to know if I can find my way back. No matter how lost I've gotten driving, I've never felt scared or worried about not finding my way back to where I need to be. I hate people giving me directions, and I want to know if I can find my own and follow them."

Jake nods, and that feeling, that distance between them, her aloneness, it stings him, but all he can do is nod at her and hope for the best. All he can do is hope, even if hope is such a fleeting thing.

"When do you feel most content?" she asks.

"When I'm here," he says, without thinking about it, and feeling stupid once it's out there, but presses forward. "With you, and you're doing your thing, but we're not alone. I like it."

She bites her lip. "Do you want it always be me doing my thing, and you doing yours?"

Her question confuses him. What does she mean? Was she not as content with him as he was with her?

"Why do you like me?" she grits out.

He blinks. "Because," is all he can voice, but inside, he has a list of things he loves about her. The way she loves to take charge. The way she sings and dances while watering the tomatoes. The way she'll sit with him in the quiet and not pressure him to say anything. Their comfortableness in being them and nothing else mattering.

She gets angry by his word. He always spook to her in monosyllables. Words that were easy to say. Stupid, pointless words that filled the air between them, but in their essence meant _nothing. _

"Because _why_?" she presses on.

He's quiet, as if he's gathering thoughts, and is going to list one by one each individual reason he loves her, but he can't. He's never been good with words. They're messy, and easily misinterpreted, and he can't bring himself to do it. To just say each and everything he's felt, to make her say the things she feels. He doesn't know how, and he wants too, but he can't.

"Get out." Her tone is low and deadly, and it's as serious as he heard her in a long time.

He leaves, and once he's gone she cries, because she was hoping he'd fight her to stay.

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She goes for a drive that night, and when she's lost on a dark narrow road, she realizes she never turned the radio on.

She's driving endlessly down the road. The radio low and the station full of static, but she doesn't care. The sound is filled by the load roar of her own thoughts.

She's lonely, and she's sad, and she's tired. The tiredness is what scares her the most.

She feels like every day in their silence, she's played soccer as hard as she's ever played it. She feels restless, and her heart is filled with words she needs to say, but she feels like no one would listen to them if she let them out there.

He should be the one she should tell these words to. She wants too. She wants to write them all down and send them to him – or maybe she'll scream them at him with the hope that maybe he'll finally hear the darkness she's lived in and maybe then she won't feel so alone.

But she is alone, in her car, traveling down a road that leads to nowhere, with the hopes she'll find her way home again.

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He's in his room smoking a joint, carelessly blowing smoke to the window.

He usually cares if people are home. Helen will be furious, and Glenn will pretend he's a father, and Jake's never been in the mood, but tonight he doesn't have it in him to care.

He can see her face, telling him to leave, telling him of her loneliness, wanting to know why he'd love her… why he'd stay.

He wants to call her, and he's picked up his phone so many times and looked down at her number, his fingers so close to pressing it, but he couldn't.

He's typed and deleted so many things he needed to say to her, and can't.

He isn't the type to talk, to share feelings. Feelings, like words were messy. Letting people in was messy. He was good on his own, but liked sharing his alone with her, and maybe he was stupid enough to think she liked it too.

He doesn't know because she doesn't complain. Doesn't telling the things he needs to be doing and saying, and now that he's been given the opportunity, he can't.

He doesn't know the words to say to help her, to help them. He doesn't know what's stupid, and what feelings won't sound insincere to her ears, and all he wants is for her to know that he loves her because she's her. She makes him feel less alone, and that matters, and he thought he was doing the same thing for her.

But in the end, he doesn't have the words. Doesn't have anything to tell her that could make her feel like he does, and make her feel whole in the quiet moments when he's most content. In the end it's just him, trying to figure out when "they" became "him".


End file.
